Voicebox 360

The queen of video-game acting.

If you are waiting for an actor at Technicolor Game Sound Services, in Burbank, California, there is a strong possibility that you will not hear him coming. In the past few years, the voice work for hundreds of video games and animated projects has been recorded in Technicolor’s mix rooms, and the first thing any voice-over performer learns is not to wear noisy clothing. On a recent morning, actors signed in at the Technicolor reception desk and silently flitted away toward their assigned mix rooms while I sat in the lobby anticipating the arrival of Jennifer Hale, whose performances in more than a hundred and twenty video games have led her colleagues and many ordinary gamers to regard her as a kind of Meryl Streep of the form. Hale turned up in an irreproachably silent long-sleeved cotton shirt and black jeans. “If you’re wearing nylon, forget it,” she told me. “You’re naked in five minutes.”

To actors, accustomed to the vagaries of a fundamentally insecure profession, the burgeoning and profitable world of video games represents a welcome growth area. But the peculiarities of the work extend well beyond the need for silent attire. Most acting, from Ibsen to the thirty-second skin-cream ad, is linear. Video games—in which the variable fortunes of any given player tend to necessitate a script that is a maze of branching possibilities—often aren’t. Most actors are happiest when they understand their character’s “motivation” and “arc.” Video-game actors become skilled at working with little or no context, and at providing varying inflections for any line on demand—a practice discouraged by many standard acting texts. (Sanford Meisner’s classic, “On Acting,” insists that “the foundation of acting is the reality of doing,” and that “making readings in order to create variety” is fraudulent.) Strangest of all, perhaps, for a profession in which one’s face is an important source of one’s fortune, video-game actors work in conditions of near-anonymity. Hale told me that when she drives around Los Angeles and sees billboards for games she has worked on, she sometimes feels like “the invisible girl,” but she understands that this is a necessary corollary of voice-over work. “My job,” she said, “is to not exist.”

Hale is in her late thirties, with long, thick dark-brown hair that has faint almond highlights, and dimples that colonize her face when she smiles. In Technicolor’s corporate Day-Glo precincts, she cut an incongruous figure, projecting a pleasant, outdoorsy affect that stopped just short of hippie. She loves hiking, rock climbing, and riding horses. She openly deplored my consumption of diet soda, and eventually persuaded me to quit for a month and to report my findings. I soon found that Hale has never played any video games herself. “I have so little free time,” she said with a shrug, explaining that she preferred to spend what free time she did have outdoors, in the “dirt.”

Hale was at Technicolor to record dialogue for Mass Effect 3, a sprawling science-fiction game whose first two installments sold more than five million copies. In the new game, which will be released early next year, Hale reprises the role of Commander Shepard. Shepard is the character the player controls, and quite a bit of dialogue is assigned to her. This was Hale’s second recording session for Mass Effect 3, and it was to last four hours and cover several sections of the game. During the next few months, she had at least twenty further sessions to look forward to. The Mass Effect games are, by and large, written before they are animated—an unusual sequence in game development but the norm at BioWare. The script’s emphasis on dialogue and decision gives the game experience an unusual narrative richness; in this magazine Nicholson Baker praised Mass Effect 2 for its “novelistic” quality. The script for the first Mass Effect ran to three hundred thousand words; the second to three hundred and seventy thousand. (By comparison, a typical English translation of “War and Peace” has around half a million words.)

We walked past the doors of several mix rooms. In one, an audio engineer was sitting at a brightly lit soundboard while an actor performed on the other side of a large window, urgently gesticulating but inaudible. In another, Hale introduced me to Caroline Livingstone, Mass Effect 3’s voice-over producer and director; Mac Walters, its lead writer; and David Walsh, a Technicolor audio engineer. Livingstone asked Hale if she wanted anything to drink. Hale requested a glass of water—if possible, not in a plastic glass. “I’m nursing,” she said. “I may not have a clean system, but I’d like to give one to my son.”

Hale left for the recording booth, a ten-by-ten room, with gray carpet and gray ceiling and gray sound-absorbent padding on the walls. BioWare records its game dialogue in Los Angeles, Edmonton, and London, but every word of dialogue used in its games is recorded in the same conditions and with the same peerlessly sensitive equipment. When Hale drank from her ceramic cup of water, a front tooth struck the rim with a resonant ching. Hale readied herself, the booth’s track lighting lending her face a glossy ivory glow. A microphone anchored in a shock mount was arranged to hang just below her eye level. The two most important technical considerations when working with such a microphone are to maintain a consistent “mike distance” and to try to keep from “popping” one’s consonants. Shielding the mike was a circular and darkly translucent windscreen, which minimized any plosive miscalculations.

A few minutes into the session, Hale was asked to vocalize the noises the player would hear when he or she pressed a button to make Shepard sprint. While making these noises, Hale had to avoid moving and keep her mike distance. I had heard versions of this sound probably hundreds of times while playing Mass Effect. Hale, standing perfectly still, softly huffed and puffed into the microphone. When I closed my eyes, I could see Shepard running.

At the beginning of Mass Effect, the player has to choose a gender for Shepard. If one opts for a female Shepard (FemShep, to the game’s fans), Hale performs her. If one opts for a male Shepard (BroShep), Mark Meer, a Canadian actor, performs him. According to BioWare, eighty per cent of players select BroShep, a statistic that is regarded as something of a tragedy by the gaming intelligentsia. Kirk Hamilton, the games editor for the magazine Paste, told me, “It’s always been hard for me to communicate to people just how much Hale’s performance improves the experience of Mass Effect. She works at a slow burn; each pause and inflection accumulates over time, until you can’t help but care for the character she’s playing.”

“It’s certainly very frustrating to hear Shepard spoken of primarily as a man,” Hale told me. She attributed the situation to the way that society perceives women in leadership positions. It probably hasn’t helped that all the Mass Effect promotional material thus far, including the game box, has featured images of a male Shepard—a thoroughly generic space-marine lunkhead. At one point in Mass Effect 2, BioWare hints at an admission that FemShep has been grossly shortchanged: a teammate mentions that Shepard was used as a poster girl for military recruitment, but she did not test well among focus groups and was replaced with a composite figure.

As the game progresses, players make further decisions about Shepard. In each interaction with other characters, Shepard can behave with relative kindness (the Paragon option) or with hard-charging recklessness (Renegade), or, in the first installments of the game, can take a nameless, middle-of-the-road approach. How the player decides what to say and do is governed by what BioWare calls the “paraphrase system,” a clever (and patented) technology that presents the player with an array of summaries (“I’m honored,” “This is unexpected,” “This is a terrible idea”). Once the player picks a paraphrase, Shepard speaks accordingly (“I’ll do everything in my power to help you,” “It would have been helpful to know about this earlier,” “I’m not a lawyer!”), and the conversation continues. In most cases, when the player selects a paraphrase, one or more avenues of discussion are closed off, in order to maintain conversational consistency. This means that even someone playing as FemShep will require several playthroughs to hear all of Hale’s recorded performance.

If one of the secrets of successful stage and film acting is seeming to be unwatched—also known, absurdly, as “looking natural”—the secret to Hale’s video-game acting may be disguising the fact that she is reading lines first seen only minutes beforehand and for which she has been given comparatively little context. A film or television actor knows where her character begins and where her character ends up, which allows her to create the illusion of dramatic momentum even if something is filmed out of sequence. Hale works from a much narrower store of available information. Frequently, all she has to go on is the copy in front of her and the scene-setting description provided by writers and producers. She works not from a text but from text.

As she prepared to record one scene, Hale wanted to know whether she could insert into her performance sighs and other off-script inflections. “We can’t do that, because there’s two of you,” Walters said. FemShep’s and BroShep’s lines, though separate, have to match, because both Shepards share the same interlocutors. Going off script, even slightly, can alter the tone of an exchange.

“I always forget that!” Hale said. “There should only be one!” She laughed, and apologized, and laughed again. She asked how much ambient noise would be added to the scene.

“Lots,” Livingstone said. “There’s a sandstorm.”

To manage Mass Effect 3’s script, BioWare was using a new system, called VADA, or Voice and Dialogue Editor and Recorder. (“The acronym doesn’t match for reasons I can’t even begin to get into,” Livingstone told me. My guess: a more easily harvested acronym than VADA would be VADER, a trademark registered by LucasFilm.) The system is paperless and allows for scenes to be called up instantly, by file name. On the master VADA screen, which Hale could not see, all the game’s scenes were listed as file names. Walsh used a trackball to navigate through the scene list, controlling the recording process via his computer keyboard. As Hale spoke, Walsh’s fingers moved as though he were playing a tiny, silent piano. Meanwhile, in the booth, Hale read from a wireless iPad-like tablet. Her lines appeared in clusters of bold type, with the cue lines of other characters in smaller type. There were stage directions, too—“cinematic comment,” in VADA-speak: “This is NOT casual conversation”; “This is a fairly intimate conversation. Normal intensity.” The cinematic comment was there to provide Hale with additional bits of context. She later confessed to missing the paper-based dialogue system used for Mass Effect 1 and 2, which, she said, allowed her to “flip ahead and read as much as I can.”

Livingstone told me that Hale’s “secret” was to do three or four and sometimes five highly variant takes of a single-line reading in a row. “Jennifer could do seventeen thousand readings and they’ll all be completely different,” Livingstone said. “And we can use them all. They all could work.” Hale finished, and Livingstone gave her verdict: Take Two was an “alt” and Four was a “keeper.”

Michael Abbott, a professor of theatre at Wabash College and the proprietor of an influential gaming blog, told me, “You’d expect players to be tired of hearing Jennifer Hale’s voice after dozens of games, but she’s made herself untraceable. She’s played everything from a love-struck English schoolgirl to a stoic, battle-tested soldier. She’s a chameleon. It helps that she has a knack for making exposition and technical language sound like dinner conversation.”

I noticed that when Hale performed as Shepard her lush, dulcet speaking voice hardened somehow, as though edged in concrete. “Shepard’s a military person,” she told me later. “Military people do not get what they want by being emotional.” Indeed, during the session Hale stopped a few times because she knew she had gone “too emotional.” It was not merely Shepard’s martial bearing that constrained Hale. Because of the nonlinearity of the dialogue, she had to be vigilant about letting feeling from one line spill over into another. Hale performed with an intensity that she could, apparently, summon at will. She seemed to immerse herself, often looking around maniacally, her teeth bared in primate agitation. Then, as the context of new lines was explained to her, she would pace, picking at a cuticle or rubbing her arms or looking intently at her screen.

The loneliness of acting in a booth, with no one to respond to, can be difficult. “It has to be all in my head,” Hale told me. “Environment, ambient noise, history with this person, what I need from this person, what I want from this person—all these decisions have to be made on the fly, in the moment, as quickly as possible.”

Quite often, before Hale’s takes, Livingstone would say something like “O.K., you’ve just finished a big fight.” Other contextual phrases Hale was fed to color her takes included “professional,” “romantic,” “combat,” “intimate, not romantic,” “not romantic,” “distance,” “before combat,” “walking” (also known as “walk-and-talk”), “exertion,” and “after combat.” Sometimes Hale couldn’t remember the space-opera particulars of the Mass Effect universe. When the criminal organization Cerberus was mentioned in one exchange, she paused to ask, “Is this the first time I’ve heard of Cerberus?” Walters, without missing a beat, reminded her that Shepard had spent the entirety of the previous Mass Effect in Cerberus’s employ. Hale later maintained that she was asking if this was the first time Shepard had heard of Cerberus in Mass Effect 3, but I wasn’t so sure. Either way, it was like hearing Tom Hanks ask, “Which one is Woody again?,” in a “Toy Story 3” outtake.

Hale was born in Labrador in 1972, and holds dual Canadian-American citizenship. She grew up mostly in the American South. She told me that her mother, who died four years ago, was “a wandering master’s-degree pursuer” who eventually settled on a career in epidemiology. Hale’s biological father is an outdoorsman and an intellectual (“He’d be really pissed if he heard me call him an intellectual”) who still lives in Labrador. The man who Hale says “has been my dad most of my life,” and who was married to her mother for five years, is a semi-retired microbiologist and researcher for the Gates Foundation. Based on this, one might imagine Hale’s childhood as a succession of bookish family dinners, cheerily contested Trivial Pursuit games, and bedtime stories starring friendly prokaryotes. In reality, Hale told me, “I had, probably, a more challenging experience growing up than most middle-class chicks.”

She got on well with her stepfather but did not get to know her biological father until she was in her twenties, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one. “She was in a lot of emotional pain,” Hale told me. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know that. You just know someone’s screaming at you, and flailing at you and kicking you around mentally and emotionally.” Hale’s mother told young Jennifer that she was half Native American; that she was born so premature that she nearly died; that she was descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth. None of this was true, but it may have helped prepare Hale for a lifetime of pretending to be other people. She now thinks that her mother’s prevarications must have been a way of assuaging a crippling sense of inferiority.

One of Hale’s first acting roles was when, as a teen-ager in Birmingham, she was asked to perform voice-over on the radio and paid thirty-five dollars for her trouble. “For talking,” she said. “For talking! I was out of my mind.” She believes that one of the reasons she was hired for the job was that her mother had discouraged her from speaking with a Southern accent. She went on to study acting at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and at Birmingham-Southern College, but found that the latter’s program did not suit her. “The style was broader than what I was interested in doing,” she told me. “I wanted something more filmic.” Hale got a degree in business, she says, because “you gotta eat.”

When she auditioned for her first film—an NBC movie of the week—amazingly, she booked the part. After other roles, she was selected, out of six thousand aspirants, during a nationwide search conducted by the soap opera “Santa Barbara.” “At the time, I wore giant T-shirts and baggy pants and there were some seriously hot girls in this line. I was, like, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Hale did a couple of episodes of “Santa Barbara.” After that, she worked steadily as a regional actor, but, in search of “a bigger game to play,” made the inevitable move to Los Angeles.

In the nineties, Hale made the rounds on shows that reliably cycled through young actors—“Melrose Place,” “ER,” “Charmed”—but after two years of this she began to look for more stable and lucrative work. She told me, “I thought, Well, I’ll just take voice-over and see if I can make some money there.” In 1994, she had landed her first cartoon series, “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?” To the best of Hale’s recollection, she had, at that point, never watched a cartoon from start to finish. She struggled, initially, with the unfamiliar demands of cartoon voice-over, and enrolled in cartoon-acting classes, where, she said, she learned how to “bring a tiny being to life,” and to travel “so far away from my physical self and stretch my voice to a different place.”

It was through “Carmen Sandiego” that Hale discovered video-game acting. The cartoon series spawned a video-game spinoff, and Hale was brought in to record for it. She was startled by the disassociated, scattershot approach of the process, as when she was asked to record dozens of geographic factoids. “We’re doing how many flags?” she remembers thinking. “I have to say the name of how many countries? How is this going to be used?” She shrugged. “I didn’t get it.”

From there, Hale moved into commercial voice-over. When she was starting out, the field was dominated by men, but she begged her agent to give her scripts written for male actors and, to her agent’s surprise, began getting those roles, too. Hale noted, “Nowadays, you hear a lot more women narrating commercials.” When I asked Hale if she felt similarly proud of having broken into action video games, which is probably the most male-oriented voice-over field of all, she smiled. “I like to take the boys’ jobs,” she said.

For years, video-game voice-over was often supplied by game developers themselves, with predictably indifferent results. One of the first game franchises to pioneer the use of high-profile film and television actors in video games was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto, though in the past few years Rockstar has moved in the opposite direction, hiring relatively unknown talent for prominent roles. Michael Hollick’s Niko Bellic, in Grand Theft Auto IV, and Rob Wiethoff’s John Marston, in Red Dead Redemption, are generally ranked among the finest video-game performances to date, and the performances are extraordinary, in part, because of the unfamiliarity of the actors’ voices. Overexposure is thus a pressing concern for video-game actors, and Hale spoke several times of her worries that, one day, her voice might be thought too recognizable.

The voice-over community is, by acting standards, an unusually cordial one. Hale’s friend Nolan North, who portrays Nathan Drake in the Uncharted franchise and is possibly the most recognizable male voice in video games today, enthused about the supportive nature of the community. “It’s not filled with jealousy,” he said. “We’re never mad at each other for getting something.” North believes that this collegiality is a by-product of the invisibility of video-game actors in the culture at large. “If you’re talented and a handful, there’s no place for you,” he said. He also pointed out another consequence of invisibility: “Everybody essentially makes the same amount of money, too. There’s not the disparity of income you see in other areas of acting.”

“We’re paid a flat fee,” Hale told me. “We get no percentage of any kind. That fee is based on union scale. If you’re very lucky, you can get over scale.” A few years ago, she said, she was paid twelve hundred dollars for a game that made two hundred and seventy million. I asked if that was at all galling, but she deflected my question, pointing out that game developers “do all the front-end work, and they do all the back-end work.” David Hayter, a friend of Hale’s who portrays Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is rumored to have been paid more than the industry average for his performances as Snake, though he would not comment on that. A successful screenwriter whose credits include “X-Men” and “Watchmen,” Hayter is so deeply associated with Snake that it has become, effectively, his only role. Apart from those projects which his “twelve-year-old self couldn’t say no to”—he recently agreed to play a Jedi in a LucasArts game, for instance—Hayter has more or less given up video-game acting, which makes him slightly more willing to discuss the ways in which game actors are paid and, arguably, underpaid. “The video-game industry is actively trying not to go the ways of movies, with residuals and things like that,” Hayter told me. “If you starred in a movie that made two hundred and fifty million, you’d get more for your next movie. That doesn’t happen in games. You get, maybe, double scale.” But then video-game actors lease a smaller portion of their essence than film actors do; voices, after all, are more interchangeable than faces.

Toward the end of her day at the studio, Hale came to a scene with a character referred to as A/K. It was the most emotional scene of the day, and also one of the most technically tricky, because of the ways that players’ choices in Mass Effect 1 and 2 carry over into the new sequel. A/K refers to two characters, Ashley and Kaiden, both of whom are Shepard’s teammates in Mass Effect 1 (and, depending on Shepard’s gender, potential love interests). Shepard, however, is forced to save one character and sacrifice the other, and, in Mass Effect 2, whichever of the two was saved reappears to remonstrate with him or her. The result of that conversation, which can play out in various ways, determines how the character of A/K will interact with Shepard in Mass Effect 3.

The new scene involved a tense exchange between Shepard and A/K. The first line of the scene was simple enough: “Let her/him go.” But Hale had to say it multiple times, with different emphases, in order to communicate every possible state of alarm with which Shepard would react to A/K. Hale did her customary four takes of “Let her go,” which she followed with four takes of “Let him go.” Two were growly, hateful takes, and two were hard, urgent takes. As she finished, Hale flexed as if to indicate a deepening transformation into Shepard. She was then told that her lines had to be recorded as though she were running.

“I have a question,” Hale said. “It’s pretty emotional for Shepard here. How big do you want it?”

Walters explained that he wanted Shepard to seem like more of “a real character” in this game, a character who showed “his frailty.” At Walters’s use of the masculine pronoun for Shepard, Hale smiled. “I want Shepard’s vulnerability to come out,” Walters went on, “even though not every player will choose to experience it.”

“Is Shepard sick of fighting?” Hale asked.

Walters winced in slight equivocation. When recording with Mark Meer, they had tried to communicate a war-weary Shepard, he said. “But we got feedback that the male Shepard sounded whiny.”

Hale went through the “Let her/him go” process again, recording five takes this time.

“I’ll take Five as the keeper,” Livingstone said. “And Four as a backup.”

Hale’s next line was “No!” Livingstone turned to Walters and asked, “Is this a panicked ‘No’ or an angry ‘No’?”

“It’s a”—Walters hesitated—“futile ‘No.’ ”

Hale nodded. “No!” she said, stirringly, a moment later.

“More compassion,” Livingstone said. “Less heightened.”

Hale tried again, and her “No!” seemed to emerge from some alarmed, half-strangled place in her throat.

By the end of the session, Hale had completed twenty-seven scenes and run through two hundred and twenty lines of dialogue. When I asked Livingstone how many scenes the game contained, she answered, “Hundreds.” Livingstone would sit through most recording sessions. How much time would that amount to? I asked, suddenly concerned for her. “I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “Eight hours a day for three months.” Hale would get off easier, but, by the time Mass Effect 3’s voice production wraps, she will have spent more than three hundred hours portraying Shepard.

Before Hale could stop for the day, she had to perform one last virtuoso task: Shepard’s grunts and pain noises. She was given directions for a pain noise to indicate that she had been shot once, a pain noise to indicate that she had been hit with a burst of energy, a pain noise to indicate that she had been shot while moving, a pain noise to indicate that she had been punched, a pain noise to indicate that she was nearing death, and a pain noise to indicate that she had died.

I decided that I couldn’t leave Los Angeles without playing Mass Effect 2 with Commander Shepard herself. Hale, after some hedging, agreed to try, and came to the house where I was staying. A screen came up asking us to select the male or female Shepard. “Are you kidding me?” Hale said, choosing the latter. During her interactions with other characters, I asked Hale whether she would play as Paragon Shepard or as Renegade Shepard. “I’m going to go with the middle-of-the-road Shepard,” she said. “I want to hear my middle responses, because they’re the hardest to land. Filling them with energy and emotion takes a lot of focus.”

Upon hearing her first spoken words in the game—“The distress beacon is ready for launch”—Hale groaned. “Drives me nuts,” she said. “I could have made that better.” As the game began, she looked helplessly at her controller, as she tried to move Shepard forward. “Wait,” she said. “What am I missing? The right what moves me?”

“The right stick moves the camera,” I said. “The left stick moves you.”

She had somehow maneuvered the in-game camera into its least obliging position. “I’m looking at my own tush,” Hale said. Soon, she had Shepard running through the hallways of her spaceship as it came under devastating attack. Hale leaned forward to turn up the volume, in order to hear Shepard’s breathing. Something in her eyes changed, and she began to nod. “This is actually really informative,” she said.

We watched an eerie scene in which Shepard is sucked out of an airlock and into the soundlessness of space, the only sound her increasingly labored breathing as her frantic, thrashing limbs gradually relax into death. Hale sat back. “I remember recording this vividly. It’s really fun to die, specifically.”

In the game, of course, Shepard is swiftly resurrected. Soon, Hale had her first taste of combat. She struggled with learning how to take cover, shoot, move while shooting, climb over cover, reload, and find ammunition, all the while keeping the camera centered in front of her. But when the game required her to find a grenade launcher and dispatch a platoon of hapless robots she did so quickly and efficiently. “Handled it!” she said, in a tight, confident voice. It was, I realized, Shepard’s voice.

After an hour or so, she indicated that she was ready to stop playing. But I realized that the next sequence would bring Shepard into her first contact with a character known as the Illusive Man, who is played by Martin Sheen—an actor Hale had never met. “We should really keep going until you have your conversation with Martin Sheen,” I said.

During the interaction with the Illusive Man, Hale pursued every available line of conversation possible, trying to hear as much of her performance as she could. When the Illusive Man, at last, dismissed Shepard, Hale put the controller down and stared at it. It seemed unlikely that she would be picking up another controller anytime soon.

“So how did that feel?” I asked.

It was helpful, she said, but, beyond gaining a basic understanding of what playing games is like, she felt surprisingly unaltered. Or maybe that was not so surprising. “I’m used to living in a disassociated universe,” she said. ♦